Collecting rain water for your garden, indoor plants, or anything else you need to water outside is easier than it sounds. You’ll need a few supplies, but our friends at Old World Garden Farms makes it sound easy—and ever so important now that the weather is warm and water conservation is mandatory in many places.

Over at the Old World Garden Farms blog, they explain all you’ll need is a sizable rain barrel (they use a massive 275 gallon one they got for $40 on Craigslist), but smaller ones are available at your local department store) and they installed junctions in their house gutters and downspouts to divert some of the water to the barrel, which is probably what you’ll want to do as well. They explained that in a single two-hour downpour they can sometimes collect over a hundred gallons, so it’s a worthwhile exercise.

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While you do this, it’s important to keep your rainwater container dark and covered. Keeping it dark makes sure that algae or other light-feeding organisms don’t bloom in your water, and keeping it covered keeps the bugs out (especially mosquitoes, who love standing water.) Finally, they remind us that it’s important not to use the water for drinking unless you treat it (they don’t treat theirs, so it’s only used to keep their garden and other plants happy.)

The method linked below is a bit larger scale than most people would consider for their house in the burbs, or their community garden in the city, but it’s still doable (as long as your local HOA or other authority doesn’t pitch a fit about a barrel here or there.) They explain that almost all of the water they use on the property comes from rainwater—which is really important considering they don’t have a well or other natural spring. The end result doesn’t just save water overall, it also saves them the money they’d spend using municipal supplies.